Montag, 16. September 2013

Dom Maltempi's reflections on new Dirty Beach's double album

Its Cleveland 1978, Life Stinks-- by Pere Ubu---
ricochets from a squalid….. No, it’s 1985. Asylum Party is playing in your
head. You’re passed out standing up, leaning on a tottering book-case in
Courbevoie, France. The denuded and pointedly emotional sounds festoon around
each other sending one into a blurry dream orbit. Or it might as well be 2013
in Berlin. It is! Hello Berlin! Dirty Beaches have released their new
double album Drifters/Love is the Devil. The albums were recorded in Montreal, and in
Berlin. Drifters reaches out to a listener, shows a
little raw skin, keeping one’s ear close, head moving about a bit, but not
richly swallowed up in what is to come on the second half. There is more
movement in the synths, exposed flesh in the cool oscillating pressures that
push around a track such as the almost danceable Belgrade. First tune ‘Night
Walk,’ is strong, playfully-ribald, crepitating, viscerally metallic, stomping
not always so seriously into that half-dark water.These songs are intensely personal, and share the same conceptual blood. I couldn’t stop their earnest procession once I picked up the album. I got the sensation when I heard them of being led to a quiet screening room, where the sounds were presented visually, strongly inscribing themselves as a unitary creature wandering a unique shifting landscape, at turns painfully enshrouded in minimal murk, and quietly brimming with pulchritude. The artist was/is dealing with the loss of love, and had moved to Berlin.
The past be damned, the possible aesthetic or other sorts of antecedents of these conjoined albums drugged, and peacefully dragged by the arms through the mirage halls—--legs calmly twitching, newly shaved. I’ve had little exposure to the music made by Alex Zhang Hungtai. A few Dirty Beaches tunes have hit my ear, and resonated nicely; but I never followed up due to the usually shitty attention fracturing whip-and-wait moments of my day. Perhaps that’s for the better. I’m not drawn to make comparisons to their previous records. I came across this new album haphazardly, washing dishes, and listening to an on-line music stream. A track comes on.
"I don't know how to find my way back to you," breathes the deep red gelid air of Gesualdo—an Italian Noblemen and madrigalist of the late 16th Century, who murdered his cuckolding wife and lover after he caught them in flagrante delicto late at night when they thought he would be away doing whatever counts did back then.
Carlo knew what was up, and he took revenge.

The track may not be possessed by the same—at
times shockingly chromatic passages, sung with equal voices soaring dissonantly
higher into space, and experimentally shaking the firmament sick. It does share
a peculiar slow tempo that radiates out a wide flowing agony, heart stung
lashing and longing, other-worldly clam and terror---bridging to who knows
where else. It is the track that feels like the central bridge between the two
albums, a dissonant nexus, a south sinking tunnel with soft hands digging. The
songs on “Love is the Devil,” are the ones that stayed with me more, becoming
the more infecting and impressive.
The song Berlin closes Love is the Devil. The hardly dressed song watches itself
from a cragged and high-altitude small tight patch. Its air is thin, but noble.
It’s best not to shuffle around too much on this precarious but calming perch.
Perhaps ones equanimity can be recaptured again, perhaps not. It is night and
somewhere north of forlorn in relation to the rest of the latter half of this
double album. There is much wandering about, and this spreading floor of
wandering is strewn with exilic objects casting long shadows. Berlin blends
with crickets well, and falls out of its crestfallen stockings in its 7 minutes
and 37 seconds--- while walking an even pace back to who knows what.
http://dirtybeaches.blogspot.de/http://dirtybeaches.bandcamp.com/